Here’s another one from the “You can’t make this stuff up” Department at the North Carolina General Assembly. Today, at 10:00 am in the Legislative Press Conference Room, the N.C. Retail Merchants Association will kick off a canned food drive to help feed the state’s poor and hungry citizens.

“What’s so strange about that?” you might ask.

Here’s what: 

The N.C. Retail Merchants Association is the exact same lobby group that is helping to spearhead the legislature’s mean-spirited and unprecendented attack on the state’s already inadequate unemployment insurance benefits program!

You got that? Last week, a lobbyist for the group was a featured speaker at an employer-sponsored press conference to tout the legislation and characterize the state’s workers as lazy and undeserving of benefits — even though the jobless outnumber the stock of available jobs three-to-one. Today, the same group will issue a plea for average citizens to cough up some canned food to throw at those same out-of-work families (and then stand by and bask in the glow of the positive P.R. the event will produce).

Truly amazing.